by David Weber
He growled again and shook himself. Discussions with gods might be very impressive, he thought grumpily, but they seemed to offer far less guidance than all the tales insisted. It was still up to him and Brandark to deal with the scum ahead of them, and he looked around for his friend.
The Bloody Sword had fallen back beside the pack animals, sitting his horse with a sort of studied nonchalance to emphasize his disinterest in Bahzell’s one-sided conversation. The Horse Stealer smiled sourly and walked across to him.
“I’m thinking we’d best be hitting them this afternoon,” he said, resuming the discussion Tomanāk had interrupted. “It’s not the odds I’d choose, but they’ll not get better just for our wishing, and it’s in my mind we might use the snow against them. If it’s after coming down as heavy as it looks to, we can likely use it for cover and keep ’em from realizing there’s naught but the two of us.”
Brandark’s expression was unhappy as he contemplated the odds, yet he couldn’t fault Bahzell’s reasoning. If two warriors were mad enough to attack forty, they’d best wring every possible advantage from surprise and confusion, and few things were more surprising or confusing than an ambush out of a snowstorm.
“Agreed,” he said after a moment, “and I thin-”
He broke off in midword, staring past Bahzell’s shoulder, then gasped an oath. The Horse Stealer wasted no time asking what he’d seen. He only reached up and ripped his cloak loose with one hand even as he spun on his toes. He flung the garment away like a huge, dark bat, billowing on a sudden gust of wind, while his other hand went back over his shoulder. One instant he was speaking to Brandark; the next, five feet of sword flared from its sheath and gleamed dully in the pewter light as he fell into a guard stance.
A mounted rider sat his horse ten yards away. Neither of the hradani nor any of their animals had as much as noticed his arrival; he was simply there , as if he’d oozed up out of the herringbones of snow and stems of dead grass, and Bahzell’s ears went flat and the nape of his neck prickled. Snow or no snow, no one could have crept up that close-not on a horse-without his noticing! Zarantha’s mule stamped, steel rasped, and saddle leather creaked behind him as Brandark drew his own sword, and the background moan and sigh of the wind only made the stillness seem more hushed.
Bahzell watched the rider, poised to attack, and the horseman cocked his head to gaze back. He was tall for a human-almost as tall as Brandark-and he sat his saddle as if he’d been born in it. The raised hood of his snow-stippled Sothōii-style poncho shadowed his face and hid his features, but he wore a longsword, not a sabre, and there was neither a quiver at his saddle nor a bow on his back. The stranger let the silence linger for a long, breathless moment, then touched his mount with his heels. The horse walked slowly closer, and the Horse Stealer’s ears folded even tighter to his skull. That winter-shaggy warhorse was no courser, but only a Sothōii-or someone with a prince’s purse-could own its equal. The hradani held his breath as the rider drew up again, well within the reach of Bahzell’s sword, and rested both gloved hands on the pommel of his saddle.
“Impressive,” he said dryly. His voice was deep for a human’s, though far lighter than Bahzell’s own subterranean bass. “Very impressive. But there’s no need for all this martial ardor, I assure you.”
“Do you, now?” Bahzell rumbled back.
“Of course I do, Bahzell Bahnakson.”
The Horse Stealer gritted his teeth in pure frustration. Dreams, magi, wizards, gods, missions-his life had become entirely too full of portents and omens without mysterious horsemen materializing out of the very ground to call him by name, and there was a hard, dangerous edge to his voice when he spoke again.
“Suppose you let me be making my own mind up about that. And while you’re being so free with my name, who might you be?”
The stranger chuckled. The pure amusement of the sound flicked the hradani like a whip, and he felt the first, hot flicker of the Rage. He ground his heel down upon it, but it was hard in his present mood. He’d served as the butt of the universe’s bad jokes long enough, and he growled deep in his throat as the newcomer reached up and drew back the hood of his poncho.
The horseman was older than Bahzell had assumed from his voice and the way he sat his horse. His neatly trimmed beard and hair were whiter than the snow about them, and his lean face was dark and weathered. There were surprisingly few wrinkles to go with that silver hair, yet something about his features suggested an ancient hardiness that went far beyond mere age. The Horse Stealer noted the Sothōii-style leather sweatband that held back his hair, the strong straight nose, the square jaw whose stubborn jut not even the beard could disguise, but they hardly registered, for they were dominated and eclipsed by the horseman’s eyes. Strange eyes, that called no color their own but flickered and shifted even as he watched, dancing like wildfire in the dull winter light. They had neither pupil nor white, those eyes, only the unearthly flowing fire that filled the sockets under craggy white eyebrows.
Bahzell stared at them, shaken and half-mesmerized. An alarm bell seemed to toll deep inside him, battering at the fascination which held him motionless, and he heard Brandark hiss behind him.
“I think Brandark recognizes me, Bahzell,” the stranger said in that same, dryly amused tone.
“That’s as may be, but I don’t,” Bahzell shot back, shaking off the impact of those fiery eyes with an effort, “and I’ve had a hard enough day without riddle games in the snow.”
He took a half-step forward, sword ready. The horseman only smiled, as if at a child in a tantrum, and Bahzell felt the Rage flare at his core once more at the other’s amusement, but Brandark spoke suddenly from behind him.
“I wouldn’t do anything hasty, Bahzell,” the Bloody Sword said in a very careful tone. “Not unless you really want to spend a few years as a toad.”
“What?” Bahzell’s ears twitched, but his attention was so focused on the stranger that his friend’s words hardly registered.
“That sort of thing happens to people who attack wizards,” Brandark said, and a bolt of sheer fury lashed through the Horse Stealer at the word “wizards.” The Rage slipped the frayed leash of his will, and he lunged forward with a murderous snarl. The tip of his sword thrust straight for the stranger’s chest, but the horseman didn’t even move. He only gazed at the hradani, and his eldritch eyes flashed like twin suns.
Something Bahzell had no words to describe slammed into him. It struck like a hammer fit to shatter a world, yet there was a delicacy to it, as well-almost a gentleness, like a man snatching a hummingbird from midair without so much as ruffling its feathers-and unaccustomed panic sparkled at his heart as it did the impossible and froze a hradani in the grip of the Rage. He found himself utterly unable to move, his murderous lunge arrested a foot from its target, and the stranger shook his head apologetically.
“Excuse me. I know you’ve had a difficult time of late, and I really shouldn’t let my questionable sense of humor get the better of me. But I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a very long time, Bahzell, and I just couldn’t resist.”
Bahzell stood motionless, and fresh shock rippled through him as he realized the Rage had vanished. Somehow the stranger had banished it as if it had never come, and that was the strangest thing of all.
The horseman moved his mount aside, out of the line of Bahzell’s lunge but still where the hradani could see him, and he bowed from the saddle.
“Again, I ask your pardon for my behavior,” he said gravely. “And in answer to your question, Bahzell, my name is Wencit. Wencit of Rūm.” This time he made a tiny gesture with one hand, and whatever had held Bahzell fled. He staggered forward with the force of his interrupted attack, but a fresh paralysis-this one of sheer disbelief-held him as tightly as the vanished spell. He gawked at the man on the horse, jaw dropping, stunned as even Tomanāk’s appearance out of the night had not left him, and lowered his sword very, very slowly.
Wencit of Rūm. It couldn’
t be. Yet, at the same time, it had to be. Only one man had eyes like that, and he’d been a fool not to realize it, but even as he thought that, he knew why he hadn’t. A man didn’t expect to meet a figure out of legend in a snowstorm a hundred leagues from anywhere.
“Wencit of Rūm?” he repeated in a dazed tone, and the horseman nodded. “The Wencit of Rūm?” Bahzell persisted with the numbness of his shock.
“So far as I know, there’s only one of me,” Wencit said gravely. Bahzell darted a look at Brandark, and the astonishment on the Bloody Sword’s face was almost deeper than his own. Of course. Brandark was a scholar who’d always wanted to be a bard. No doubt he knew all the tales of the Fall and the part Wencit of Rūm, lord of the last White Council of Wizards, had played in saving what he could from the wreck of Kontovar. But that had been twelve centuries ago-surely the man couldn’t still be alive!
But he was a wizard, Bahzell reminded himself. A wild wizard. Possibly the most powerful single wizard who’d ever lived. Who knew what he could or couldn’t be?
“Well,” the Horse Stealer said finally, sheathing his sword with mechanical precision. “Wencit of Rūm.” He shook himself like a dog shaking water from its coat. “It’s not so very fond of wizards my folk are, but then, most of them aren’t so very fond of us , either.” He smiled crookedly and folded his arms across his chest. “And what, if I might be asking, brings Wencit of Rūm out in all this?” He flicked his ears at the thickening snow, and there was an edge of darkness in Wencit’s answering smile.
“Very much what brings you.” The wizard dismounted and stroked his mount’s neck while the horse lipped his white hair affectionately.
“Ah?”
“Ah, indeed. There’s no White Council now, Bahzell, but I do what I can to stop the abuse of the art. I’ve come to rely heavily on the magi’s aid for that, and the Axe Hallow mage academy got word to me when Zarantha didn’t reach home on schedule.”
He shrugged, and Bahzell nodded.
“Aye, she’d be important to you, and the magi, wouldn’t she now?”
“If you’re referring to her plans to found a Spearman mage academy, the answer is yes. But if you’re suggesting her mage talent is all that makes her important to us, you’re wrong.” Wencit spoke almost mildly, but there was a hint of steel in his voice, and Bahzell nodded again, accepting the rebuke, if that was what it had been.
“Fair enough,” he said slowly, “but I’m just the tiniest bit confused. You’ve been glued to their trail like a lodestone for days now, and I’m thinking the likes of you could deal with the wizards who have her.”
“And you want to know why I haven’t.” Wencit made the question a statement, and Bahzell nodded yet again. “It’s not quite as simple as you may think, Bahzell. Oh, you’re right, I could deal with either of them-or both together-easily enough, but not with the men they have with them. Not without violating the Strictures, at any rate.”
“The Strictures?” Bahzell’s arched eyebrow invited further explanation, but it was Brandark who answered him.
“The Strictures of Ottovar, Bahzell,” the Bloody Sword said, dismounting from his own horse to stand beside his friend. “They were the laws of wizardry in Kontovar, the rules the White Council was formed to enforce.”
“Among other things,” Wencit amended with a nod.
“And what might the Strictures be?” Bahzell asked.
“Exactly what Brandark said: the laws of wizardry. Or of white wizardry, at any rate. They were written by Ottovar the Great and Gwynytha the Wise when they ended the wizard wars of their own time and founded Ottovar’s empire. In simple terms, they were designed to protect those who don’t have power from casual abuse by those who do.”
“And you’re still after following them all these years later?”
“If I don’t, who will?” That steely edge was back in Wencit’s voice, and his wildfire gaze bored into Bahzell’s eyes. “Does time alone define right or wrong? And even if it did, by what right could I demand other wizards obey them-or hold them accountable when they don’t-if I violated them myself?”
“Aye, there’s that,” Bahzell agreed slowly, rubbing his chin with one hand, then gave the wizard a sharp look. “Still and all, I can’t but think you’ve hunted us out to do more than tell us what it is you can’t be doing.”
“True.” Wencit smiled almost impishly and gave his horse’s neck another pat, then leaned back against his saddle and surveyed the two hradani. “Under the Strictures, I may use sorcery against nonwizards only in direct self-defense, and even then I can’t kill them if anything short of killing will keep me alive. Wizards-especially dark wizards-are another matter. Them I can challenge to arcane combat, but somehow I doubt their henchmen could refrain from sticking a knife in my back while I do it.”
“Ah,” Bahzell said again, and exchanged glances with Brandark before he looked back at Wencit. “I’m hoping you won’t take this wrongly,” he said politely, “but I’m thinking I see where you’re headed, and twenty-to-one might be just a mite heavy odds for us to be keeping off your back while you satisfy your principles, Wencit.”
“I know,” Wencit said cheerfully, “but with the right help, you won’t be facing twenty-to-one odds.”
“And here I was thinking you’d just said you couldn’t use sorcery against nonwizards.”
“Oh, but I won’t use a single spell on them ,” Wencit said, and something in his smile was as cold as the falling snow.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The sentry huddled in the lee of a patch of scrub, hugging himself under his cloak while cataracts of white roared past. Storms this fierce were rare in these southern plains, and he stamped his feet and peered uselessly into the whirling snow devils. Visibility was as much as thirty yards between wind gusts, but such intervals were rare, and he swore balefully. Posting guards was pointless on a night like this, but there’d been no use arguing, and he swore again, this time at himself for ever having taken service with the Church of Carnadosa.
Black wizards were perilous paymasters at any time, for the same penalties applied to a black wizard’s hirelings as to himself. That meant the money was good, of course, yet his employers were being less open than usual this time, and the presence of assassins made him almost as uneasy as his ignorance of what was on their track. Carnadosa and Sharna were never comfortable allies, and anything that could bring their followers into alliance was bound to be risky.
The sentry knew he was only a hired sword to the Church, yet this was the first time his masters had refused to explain anything . They’d simply sent him and twenty others out to meet two of their number-and the dog brothers-in the middle of this howling wilderness, and the palpable anxiety which possessed the people they’d met was enough to make anyone nervous. Whatever was back there, it had inspired the travelers to push their horses dangerously close to collapse and post guards even in the heart of a blizzard, and the sentry was uncomfortably certain it was all somehow due to the presence of their prisoner. He didn’t know who she was, either, and he didn’t want to. The senior of his employers-a priest of Carnadosa, as well as a wizard-had her under some sort of compulsion that turned her into a walking corpse, something that moved pliantly and obediently and ate whatever was put into its mouth, yet the sentry had seen her eyes-once-and there was nothing dead about them. They burned with fury and a sort of desperate horror that set his nerves on edge and made him wish he’d never taken the money.
But he had, and wizards were bad masters to betray or desert . . . even if there’d been anywhere to desert to in this godsforsaken wasteland. No, he was stuck, and-
He never completed the thought. A towering, snow-shrouded form blended silently from the swirling whiteness behind him, a hand yanked his head back, a dagger drove up under his chin into his brain, and he never even realized he was dead.
Bahzell let the corpse slither down and wiped his dagger on its cloak. He resheathed the blade and drew his sword as two horses appeared
out of the roaring, white-streaked darkness like a pair of ghosts, and he felt the hair stir on the back of his neck once more. Wencit of Rūm had a pedigree not even hradani could question, but that made him no less uncanny, and no hradani could ever be comfortable in any wizard’s web. The notion that there was still at least one white wizard in the world would take getting used to, and even now Bahzell couldn’t quite believe that he and Brandark had actually agreed to let him enwrap them in his magic. On the other hand, Wencit had guided them to their enemies’ camp as unerringly as if the night had been clear and still, not this snowy maelstrom, and if his spells did what he’d claimed they would-
The Horse Stealer’s thoughts broke off as his companions reached him and drew rein. Wencit rose in the stirrups, thrusting his head above the low-growing trees’ cover and peering into the roaring wind as if he could actually see. He stayed there for several minutes, turning his head to sweep his gaze back and forth across something visible only to him, then settled back and wiped snow from his beard. He tucked up the skirt of his poncho to clear his well-worn sword hilt, and Bahzell told himself it was only the cold that made him shiver as those wildfire eyes moved back to him.
“There are four more sentries!” Wencit had to shout to make himself heard above the gale. “The closest is about fifty yards that way!” He gestured off to the left, then shrugged. “I imagine they’ll take to their heels when they realize what’s happening, but watch your backs!”
Both hradani nodded grimly, and Brandark drew his own sword. Wencit didn’t, but then, if all went well, the wizard would have no use for steel tonight.
If all went well.
“Remember! So far I haven’t done anything to draw attention to myself, but the instant the spell goes up, the wizards at least will know I’m here! Leave them to me, but get to Zarantha as quick as you can!”